interests began to pitch Aotearoa New Zealand as a new frontier for British colonization. A proposal for a military colony in the North Island from 1823 sketches a promising investment case, highlighting its “delightful climate … uncommon fertility of soil, [which gives] … all the necessaries and most luxuries of civilized life … [T]here is no country on earth more favourably circumstanced for the operations of agriculture than New Zealand” (McAloon 2013: 86). Back then, pictures and some text were enough to mobilize capital for agricultural ventures from abroad.
Photo 3.1 Imperial landscape in Queensland
Source: Richard Daintree, England/Australia 1832–1878, “Volcanic downs country” (no. 7 from “Images of Queensland” series), c.1870
These snapshots can be juxtaposed with the investment prospectuses of capital-raising agricultural fund managers some 150 years later. Speaking to potential investors, these similarly pitch promising landscapes across a range of geographies, albeit now backed up with hard figures and fancy graphs. When placed into that historical lineage, a phenomenon that many media, research and activist reports have hyped as the outcome of the financialization of the economy starting in the 1970s (Harvey 2007; McMichael 2012), suddenly appears less novel. Metropolitan finance has a long history of helping to transform nature into property in different parts of the world, producing and reshaping agrarian landscapes via the provision of both debt and equity capital. As David Graeber (2011: 346) puts it in his historical masterpiece Debt: The First 5,000 Years,
Starting from … [the] baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capitalism is a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates – in practical effect – to pump more and more labour out of just about everyone [and everything: my addition] with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of material goods.
Such a longue durée perspective (Edelman et al. 2013: 1528) on expansionist moments in metropolitan finance suggests that the coupling between finance and farming is less “unnatural” (Gosh 2010) than many existing accounts admit. Industry players are quick to even argue that farmland was the “oldest asset class in the world” (Lapérouse 2016: 4), which is a claim we should critically scrutinize but which nevertheless reminds us of the need to employ a broad historical optic.
The problem of many existing takes on the financialization of farming is not just that they often employ a narrow historical view (Christophers 2015a). Even the accounts more attuned to history are carried away by the presumably spectacular fact that finance now increasingly asserts direct ownership (via the acquisition of equity stakes in agricultural ventures) over the agricultural production process. Such a privileged focus on direct equity investments neglects the role that debt and stocks (as less direct forms of equity) have historically played in the making and remaking of agricultural landscapes in many parts of the world, particularly during imperial-colonial times. Moreover, during much of the twentieth century national governments around the world supported “agricultural transformation” via the provision of credit and mortgage schemes, often with tight links to both domestic and foreign sources of finance. Even the managed institutional investments in agriculture we have read so much about after the food and financial crises of 2007/8 have a surprisingly long history, as we shall see.
The historical examples discussed in this chapter show that we must carefully examine how current phases of “financialization” compare to earlier operations of finance capital formation in and through agriculture on a global scale. Yet, just because finance has had a long (but by no means straightforward) relationship with agriculture, it does not mean that there is not something new about finance’s run on all things agricultural. Eventually this chapter will do justice to this newness by outlining some of the novel features that characterize the contemporary financial economization of farming.
Frontiers into assets: imperial landscapes and the quite early globalization of finance
In agricultural economics, assets are conventionally defined as all the wealth that is at the disposal of a farmer. But, in many cases, there is a hidden story to that wealth, a history of appropriation, enclosure and transformation, and, historically, “finance” has played a significant role in that story. Indeed, a longue dureé perspective reveals that both private and public forms of finance were playing a crucial role in the production of capitalist agricultural landscapes from at least the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in different parts of the world (see Table 3.1). The colonial companies that turned indigenous territories in the regions of Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesia, India, the United States, South Africa and Argentina (to name a few) – often classified as “empty”, “idle” or “underutilized” lands – into “imperial assets” had tight links to investors and stock exchanges in the colonial metropoles (Kocka 2013: 52). These companies usually acquired lands through a variety of means, including brute force.
Much of this land was held for speculation, but also for exploiting natural resources such as timber. Examples were the New Zealand Company, the Natal Land and Colonization Company in South Africa, the Mexican Land and Colonization Company and the Santa Fe Land Company in Argentina. In 1913 there were 130 British companies of this type holding 25 million hectares of land, largely in Africa and Latin America, but also in North America and Oceania. This compares with 746 companies that held 5.6 million hectares engaged directly in agriculture through plantations, and 40 companies that held 14.2 million hectares for ranching. A further 11 companies held 2.7 million hectares through railway concessions, most of which would eventually be sold off for settlement (Byerlee 2013: 23).
Table 3.1 Examples of territory occupied and main land use, 1650–1917
| Approximate dates | Region | Latitude | Main usage in period | |||
| 1690–1830 | Cape Colony | 30–34° S | Grazing Pockets of viticulture | |||
| 1750–1820 | Old (US) Northwest | 38–41° N | Grazing Grain | |||
| 1750–1850 | Buenos Aires province | 35–40° S | Grazing | |||
| 1785–1860 |
US public domain east of Great
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